The text compares the performance of two MongoDB deployments: The Death Star, a single instance of the biggest storage-IO optimized VM on AWS, and The Force, a 100-shard cluster assembled from RAM-optimized instances. The comparisons focus on everyday queries, analytics and exploration, and demonstrate that while both can handle similar query types, they have vastly different performance characteristics. The Death Star excels in latency for single document retrieval but struggles with throughput due to page faults, whereas The Force outperforms it in throughput by a significant margin. However, The Force's performance comes at the cost of increased complexity and higher costs. The text concludes that while a single large machine can be sufficient for small-scale data storage, horizontal scaling is necessary for larger-scale applications requiring flexibility and high concurrency.